Modern culture has ripped away girls’ childhood, taking their joy with it | Elle Hunt

From the climate crisis to economic decline, the period in which this online generation remain blissfully ignorant has shrunk

It's never been easy, as Britney Spears sang, to be not a girl, not yet a woman". But a new survey carried out for Girlguiding shows that young women are less hopeful than ever of emerging on the other side, with the happiness of seven- to 21-year-olds plummeting to its lowest level since 2009.

At 32 years old, I am profoundly grateful not to be a girl today - or even much younger than I am now. When I was a teenager, through the mid-2000s, there were the time-honoured troubles of growing girls: depression, anxiety, bullying, body image issues, disordered eating, problematic interactions with the opposite sex. But - without minimising those struggles, or being blithely superior about my day" - there were some limits in place that served as checks against external harm and the adolescent impulse towards self-destruction.